Fluoroquinolones are used to treat both normal and drug resistant tuberculosis and therefore being able to work out if an infection is resistant or not to fluoroquinolones is very important. Sequencing the genome of an infection is increasingly used to rapidly return which antibiotics could be used to treat a patient with tuberculosis. Genetics-based approaches […]
Category: publication
Yesterday eLife published the first paper from our citizen science project, BashTheBug, which was launched in April 2017 on the Zooniverse platform. (Update on 19 July 2022: the final formatted version of the paper has been posted on eLife). Through BashTheBug we asked for volunteers to classify images of M. tuberculosis growing on a range […]

In this preprint, which Alice has been working on for several years, we show how alchemical free energy methods can predict whether an amino acid mutation confers resistance to an antitubercular, but only in cases where the change in binding free energy is large. This is mainly because the confidence limits on the change in […]

Oliver Adams successfully elucidated the structure of the M. tuberculosis MmpL3 membrane transporter using cryo-EM and this has recently been published online in Structure. This was the main aim of his PhD studies in Simon Newstead‘s group in the Department of Biochemistry here in Oxford. It is an important protein structure since although other MmpL3 […]

In this preprint we examine 14,151 clinical isolates drawn from the CRyPTIC dataset. Each isolate had its minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) to bedaquiline and clofazimine measured and hence we were able to identify the transcription regulator Rv0678, as the current main source of elevated MICs to both these drugs. Lindsay Sonnenkalb, who is studying for her […]

In this preprint, the CRyPTIC project proposes the maximum value of minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) for 13 different anti-TB drugs below which a sample can be considered to be ‘genotypically wild-type’. It is necessary to establish these values, called epidemiological cutoff values (ECOFFs or ECVs), so that the MICs measured can be converted into binary […]